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Not only that, but aspects of this judgement are relevant to what is being suggested for ISPs in the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that New Zealand and other countries are currrently negotiating in secret. The Judge's ruling that iiNet's refusal to obey AFACT's requests to terminate it's customers internet connections based solely on AFACT's allegations (a "three strikes" policy) was reasonable adds weight to New Zealand's rebuttal of such suggestions by other countries in those negotiations and cannot be ignored.

Through Phoromatic you can easily build a benchmarking test farm with minimal effort and combined with Phoromatic Tracker you can monitor the performance of a given software or hardware component over the course of time. We used our own tools to launch a Linux kernel tracker that monitors the performance of the very latest Linux kernel code on a daily basis at kernel-tracker.phoromatic.com. We are also announcing another new, important public tracker coming soon, but first off, we needed a few more low-powered Intel Atom systems. We ended up purchasing two MSI Wind Box NetTops (the 6667BB-003US and 6667BB-004US) that are both based around an Intel Atom 330 dual-core processor within a very low-profile enclosure. The MSI 6667BB-003US utilizes Intel GMA 950 graphics while the 6667BB-004US boasts an ATI Radeon HD 4330 graphics processor. Here is our Linux look at these two Intel nettop computers.

Hundreds of mobile developers and enthusiasts converged this weekend at the McCormick Tribune building on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Chicago to hear from other developers and industry thought-leaders about the current state of construction, deployment, and management of mobile applications.

PC-BSD 8.0 was released last week and while we have already delivered FreeBSD 8.0 benchmarks including against Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and Fedora / Debian / OpenBSD / OpenSolaris for which PC-BSD is based, we took this opportunity to deliver a fresh set of *BSD benchmarks. In this article we have benchmarks of PC-BSD 8.0 x64 against Kubuntu 9.10 x86_64.

Google yesterday released a dev-only build of Chrome for Mac OS, Linux and Windows which comes loaded with rough-round-the-edges versions of the Geolocation API. The latest update comes a few days after Google pushed out a Windows-only beta of its open source Chrome browser to its users. Google Chrome wonk Karen Grunberg wrote on the company’s blog that geolocation was switched off by default in the 5.0.342.1 build.

Following the very heated kernel DRM discussion that came about as the result of a major interface break in the Nouveau DRM code, David Airlie has asked on the Nouveau mailing list about potentially releasing Nouveau 1.0.0. Right now the Nouveau interface is at 0.0.16 and is wondering if developers will accept just renaming the current code to version 1.0.0.

This proposal is being considered so that all old user-space compatibility is gone, there is no more user-space mode-setting to support (the code is already removed), and so that there can finally be an officially released version that Linux distributions can utilize and support...

Like with most kernel release cycles, the Linux 2.6.34 kernel had another major GPU DRM update. There's core DRM improvements, the new hybrid graphics switching support, and advancements to the hardware-specific DRM bits...

At long last, it's time for the main event in the long-running legal battle between The SCO Group and Novell over who owns the copyrights of the Unix software than runs many businesses computer systems. Six years after SCO sued Novell, a trial is set to begin Monday in U.S. District Court for Utah. It will determine who owns the Unix copyrights. But the trial, expected to last three weeks, may be just the prelude to an even bigger legal battle.

[I don't think one could find a more rah-rah, pro-SCO account if one tried. All I'll mention is this: this isn't the main event in the SCO v. the World saga. Keep in mind that IBM has never cared who owns the copyrights. Its position is that it hasn't infringed them, regardless of who owns them, and if you look at the list of allegedly misused code SCO filed, you would have to agree that IBM has no reason to worry, and neither does Linux. All the rest is FUD, no matter who writes it. - PJ]

From Thursday, March 4, 2010 Washington DC Express print edition: Megan Fox Thinks She's Linux...Or Something Megan Fox has slept with only two men...."My body parts are all I have left now that are only mine -- the world owns everything else."

I am guessing some cheese ball in the headline department thought that there was some similarity between Megan Fox only owning her body parts and Linux.... Frankly, I am not seeing it.

Another day, another company developing Linux-based tech falls into line with Microsoft's intellectual property wonks. Japanese Flash maker I-O Data Device Inc has agreed to cough up an undisclosed sum of cash to Microsoft under a Linux software deal. This is the latest such agreement Microsoft has made with a tech company that uses Linux in its products.

With the Linux 2.6.33 kernel having been released last week where the ATI kernel mode-setting (KMS) DRM code left the kernel's staging area, we knew a new ATI X.Org driver release was imminent. Over the night a new stable DDX driver update has been pushed out for xf86-video-ati as well as a new pre-release for the KMS-supportive 6.13 version that also carries other changes. The xf86-video-ati 6.12.5 is the new stable update that carries bug-fixes and other work...

It was almost exactly one year to the day that FFmpeg 0.5 was released after this major free software project had not encountered a new release in quite a while. Yesterday a new FFmpeg release also made it out the door and it's FFmpeg 0.5.1...

The hedge fund Elliott Associates said Tuesday afternoon that it had made an offer to buy Novell in a deal that valued the business software company at about $2 billion. Elliott said it would pay $5.75 a share in cash for Novell, a price that is 21 percent higher than Novell's closing stock price on Tuesday. Wall Street's initial response to the bid, announced after the stock market closed, was to anticipate the possibility of a higher offer.

Among the important benefits of Linux's permission hierarchy is its ability to keep untrusted users from running amok. The all-or-nothing nature of root access, however, can present headaches when users are trusted, but only so far. That is a problem the sudo utility attempts to solve, and does so fairly well — except for the occasional glitch. A glitch of this sort turned up last week, allowing less-privileged users to skirt around sudo's protections and gain the powers of other users, including the superpowers of root. The advisory notes that impact of the vulnerability is mitigated by the utility's defaults, however. Sudo versions 1.7.2p4 (now superseded by 1.7.2p5) and 1.6.9p21 patch the vulnerability. Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu have already pushed updated versions out to users.

Symbio, a leader in next generation outsourced product development (OPD), today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the business operations of Helsinki-based Cubical Solutions, an established software engineering service company for the telecommunications, financial services and manufacturing industries. This acquisition adds market-leading specialization in open source software utilization and product development, strengthening Symbio's expertise in critical domain areas that enable rapid technology convergence between IT and telecom.

Complex file formats, such as those used for office documents, inevitably lead to differences in interpretation by application developers. If a user sends a document to someone else who views it in a different application or version, chances are that the output shows some subtle differences or, by bad luck, that the formatting is completely munged. These problems are not tied to proprietary file formats: open standards such as ODF (Open Document Format) also have interoperability issues. A web service, Officeshots, was recently launched to remedy this problem. The project is in public beta and users can register for free to upload their ODF documents. The web site then generates the output of the document using various office applications, which enables the user to check for interoperability issues. The launch of the public beta took place during the second ODF plugfest in Orvieto, Italy on November 2nd and 3rd. A lot of vendors and developers using ODF in their software gathered in Orvieto, such as IBM, Google, OpenOffice.org, Novell, KOffice, AbiWord, and Microsoft.

KnowledgeTree today announced the release of version 3.7 of its commercial edition, version 1.1 of its Microsoft(r) Office Add-in, and an alpha release of KnowledgeTree Explorer CP (cross platform). KnowledgeTree 3.7, deployed on Zend Server, features improved performance. It also introduces the first iteration of KnowledgeTree's new Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) interface, which is compliant with the 0.61 draft of the specification. KnowledgeTree Explorer CP is a cross-platform version of the popular desktop tool that allows drag and drop functionality to the repository. With cross-platform capabilities, users can enjoy this feature from Linux and Mac desktops.

"This is not a democracy, it's a meritocracy." The statement comes from the Ubuntu Governance page, but you can find similar statements in the Fedora Release Notes, the Why Debian For Developers page, and just about anywhere else were free and open source software (FOSS) projects discuss their core values. The idea that FOSS is a meritocracy is equivalent to the idea that America is the land of opportunity, or that scientists are objective. For members of the FOSS community, the idea that hard work is rewarded with recognition and the opportunity for more responsibility is central to their belief system and their sense of who they are.

David Airlie, the Linux kernel DRM maintainer and the Red Hat employee responsible for a good portion of the open-source ATI Linux driver work, has announced changes in how he will be handling his DRM kernel branches and the addition of some new branches for ATI customers wishing to experiment with the latest Radeon driver code. Under this new plan David will be controlling the drm-core-next, drm-radeon-next, drm-next, and drm-radeon-testing. Descriptions of these Git branches for the Direct Rendering Manager code can be found on the dri-devel mailing list. The important branches for desktop users wishing to experiment with the latest code is drm-next and drm-radeon-testing...

If you watched the video and wondered what the JavaScript code was for my "Move Junk" button in Thunderbird, then read on. If you haven't watched the video, this article describes how to add custom toolbar buttons to Thunderbird using the Custom Buttons addon.